God Without Religion_ Can It Really Be This Simple_ - Andrew Farley [35]
“Do the ceremony?” my mother asked, her normally calm façade beginning to show a few cracks. “What are you talking about?”
The bearded lady looked puzzled. “That was part of the package—I transport the deceased, and I do the ceremony,” she insisted. “You’re going to have to pay for it anyway.”
My mother paused and struggled visibly for control. Then she informed the driver that our family would pay the fee but that my grandmother’s minister, who was standing right there, would be finishing the service.
The bearded lady hearse driver deflated a bit but delivered my grandmother’s casket to us and drove away.
And the funeral, from that point on, really went off without a hitch.
Late to Your Own Funeral?
My grandmother had never been late a day of her life. But she was, as they say, late to her own funeral—literally. In the same way, many of us are late to our funerals. I’m not speaking of the physical, of course, but of the spiritual. Both Romans and Galatians tell us that we died with Christ:
For we know that our old self was crucified with him so that the body of sin might be done away with, that we should no longer be slaves to sin—because anyone who has died has been freed from sin. (Rom. 6:6–7)
I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me. (Gal. 2:20)
Spiritually speaking, we participated in a funeral—our own. But we need to “attend” that funeral, to witness it and be aware of its implications.
In all our talk about behavior, spiritual disciplines, and self-improvement within Christianity, I’m afraid we neglect the core message of the Christian faith—death and new life. At its root, Christianity is really about dying and waking up a brand-new person. A fundamental exchange occurs within us at the moment we place our faith in Jesus Christ for salvation. Through our own death, burial, and resurrection, we become righteous saints, children of God. And this change is real and actual, not symbolic or figurative.
There’s a whole lot more to the new covenant than simply escaping law and being under grace. Grace won’t work for just anybody. It’s only intended for those who’ve been made new at the core. It’s our newness in Christ working with the freedom of grace that unleashes expressions of God’s Spirit.
Why Die?
“Why did we have to die with Christ? Isn’t that a bit dramatic?” you might think. “Couldn’t God have done it another way?”
The New Testament tells us that we died with Christ for good reasons. First, we died to the law so we could live in a new way (Gal. 2:19; Col. 2:20). Second, we died to the power of sin so we would have a free choice (Rom. 6:2, 7, 12). Third, we died to receive a new heart, a new mind, and a new spirit—to become a new creation (Ezek. 36:26; 1 Cor. 2:16; 2 Cor. 5:17). Some of us talk about how we “gave our life to Christ.” In actuality, we had no life to give. God could not use our life. Instead, he crucified our old self and gave us a new life, his life.
The spiritual person we were in Adam was killed and laid in the tomb with Christ. “Well, yeah, positionally, but . . .” And there we go with our theological jargon. It’s quite popular to hear that the death of our old self is only “positionally” true (true “in God’s eyes” or true in heaven, but not a present reality here on earth). But there’s no scriptural basis for seeing the death of our old self as only “positional truth.”
I understand why we’ve done it: to explain our ongoing battle with sin. For similar reasons, some also say that we Christians need to “die to self.” This implies that our death with Christ is progressive, not yet complete. We’ll address the die-to-self theology in the next chapter, but first, there’s more.
The Other Half
God didn’t leave us in the tomb. He went further in raising us up with Christ and seating us right next to himself (Eph. 2:6). Did